DIGITISER
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ

ATTENTION MODERN GAMES: YOU'RE LIKE OLD-STYLE FOOD, AND THIS IS A BAD THING - by Super Bad Advice

25/5/2017

18 Comments

 
Picture
Guest post by Super Bad Advice

​So this past week I’ve finally got round to playing Horizon: Zero Dawn. As pretty much every review has said, it looks lovely and is very interesting etc... but this isn’t a review (attention: this is a review).
 
No, this is an opinion piece that’s ruptured its way out of my frontal lobes after playing Horizon for a bit now (and to be fair, quite a few other recent games). And my opinion is as follows: currently, video game stealth in most titles is like cheap 1980s-style strawberry ice cream.
                                                                            
You know the stuff – the pink stripe in the tub of Neapolitan that everyone except deviants leaves in preference for chocolate or vanilla. The stuff that has a specific sweet, vaguely fruity taste that isn’t really a very good approximation of the taste of a strawberry. That stuff.
 
This bogus strawberry flavour is now so established, people barely think about it. I’d bet most people would know it and say it was ‘strawberry’ if you gave it to them to identify blindfold, even though they also know it tastes about as much like an actual strawberry as an orange does.
Picture
RUBB​ISH DESSERT
And why are games like this rubbish dessert? Because stealth in games at the moment is also its own thing that claims to be something else. It’s a bit like what real stealth would be of course, but look more closely and it really, really isn’t.

Because if people in the real world who needed to be stealthy were ‘video game stealthy’ they’d almost certainly be spotted even by the most inept of guards, probably experiencing some sort of violent badness to their person as a consequence.
 
The thing that bust the camel’s hump clean off for me was playing as Aloy and lurking in tall grass waiting to surprise one of Horizon’s many robot dinosaur thingies with a sneak kill. One duly strolled up, stood right next to me, and proceeded to completely ignore me despite the facts (a) The foliage was fairly thin and (b) My head was clearly sticking out above the grass a bit.
 
Then I accidentally pressed the wrong button and stood up. Suddenly, and despite only being marginally more exposed than I was seconds earlier, the robot immediately went into apeshit mode. It chased me relentlessly until I managed to run round a corner, duck down again into a hedge and avoid it.

​Finally, like the massive moron it was, after about 30 seconds it went back to doing whatever it’d been doing before as if it’d never seen me in the first place. Then I stabbed it in its stupid eye, but that’s beside the point.
Picture
​FRESH CORPSES
Basically, some variant of this scenario exists in tons of current games to some degree – the moronic
baddie who inexplicably can’t make things out more than 3 metres in front of them, and who is also absurdly optimistic about whether someone is coming to kill them or not. This, even when he or she (or it) has been repeatedly spooked by something moments earlier, and is also now stood next to a pile of fresh corpses and/or all their colleagues have mysteriously disappeared.
 
Obviously I get that there has to be some leeway to make games playable, but this state of play doesn’t seem to have moved on for ages. It’s still crouch, shuffle, rely on daft enemy with serious recall issues, kill them and shuffle on.
 
Even the magnificent Breath of the Wild, which does this better than most as enemies will take longer to calm down and are a hell of a lot better at spotting you than usual, suffers from this. If you run far enough away from any pursuing nasty you’ll hit their boundary and they’ll go “Oh lovely, he’s gone. Home we go then.”

They’ll then turn their backs to you and walk off as if nothing had ever happened, even though you’re still mere metres away with a ruddy great sword. They could at least back off facing you, like a territorial animal would.
BOARDROOM
​It’s also something that occasionally cross-infects level design. Take the previous Deux Ex game, for example. There was one level where, in a flashy office block, the main boardroom was linked directly to the gents toilets by an unlockable, man-sized air con tunnel to allow you to stealth your way past a heavily-armed guard at a barrier.
 
But stop for a minute and think about what this is. OK it was locked, but a meeting room directly linked to a toilet via a vast duct? What sort of lousy architect would really create that? Because of course, what everyone in meetings likes is the smell of wee and the noise of people doing big guffs and plops.
 
It worked for the purposes of adding an option to progress in the game, but is blatantly absurd unless the company was supposed to be run by lavatorial perverts (and I’m pretty sure I’d have remembered that plot twist if it were the case).
Picture
LOOK AGAIN
​If you look back at the games of years past, so much has moved on. Graphics, obviously. Storytelling is improving too (albeit with frequent, abrupt backwards lurches). Production values? Off the chart.

But it’s time stealth got looked at again: we’re getting to the point where it’s so daft in comparison to the rest of the quality of games, and the design of games ends up doing so many things in service to the mechanic, that it’s illusion-breaking.
 
Title after title is still working with the same established premise of what video game ‘stealth’ is without moving it forward or really looking to see if it makes sense in the world they’re trying to create, and whether their approach is watertight.
                                                            
If we’re going to have stealth, let’s have it with plausible explanations for how it works and how what you as the player does is possible. Sci-fi game? Fine, let’s have a cloaking device or chemical mind-control mist. Fantasy game? Some sort of disorienting magic. Whatever the scenario, have something that explains why you can’t easily be seen and why you’re so easily forgotten, other than ‘stealth, innit?’.
THE REAL WORLD
But what about that trickiest of things, the game set in an (alleged) real-world scenario where you can’t have some sort of fantastical explanation? Well let’s do it properly and have you need to not be seen AT ALL. Let’s have guards not give up if you blunder in and knock over a filing cabinet. It’s not as if it’d be impossible to plot this out – Hollywood has been managing for decades without having to portray every henchman in spy and heist films like Mission Impossible or Bond as effectively an Alzheimer’s-riddled Mr Magoo.
 
It could even be an opportunity for original gameplay mechanics – how about you have to tap into comms signals to collect voice samples for playback over walkie-talkies to make it seem like a guard is still on patrol before you take them out (or run the risk of immediately triggering a search when they don’t report in)? Or you have to disguise yourself as a guard you’ve taken out and run their patrol while working your way to a goal?
 
But most of all, let’s finally have adversaries who can see further than their own feet and more widely than a blinkered ‘dog cone’ of vision, grass that’s actually tall enough to hide in, and enemies who don’t shrug off dead bodies lying about as if stumbling across a deceased colleague is a mundane event.

​Because I dunno about you, but I’m finding stupid pink strawb-goo of that sort increasingly difficult to swallow. Almost as difficult to swallow as the contrived set-up to that last gag. Yipe!
Super Bad Advice
FROM THE ARCHIVE:
10 STUPID CONSOLES THAT HAVE BEEN DESERVEDLY FORGOTTEN
​
HOW OLD ARE YOUR FAVOURITE GAME CHARACTERS?
FACE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE vs GAME CHARACTERS
18 Comments
Harry Steele
25/5/2017 11:21:04 am

I remember being really frustrated with the stealth in Perfect Dark as, unlike Goldeneye 007, the guards could see you through glass and when you were crouching under tables. This was of course more realistic but it made the game a lot more difficult and less fun.

It's a difficult balance: the stealth has to be a challenge but if you're forever tripping alarms and causing the level to go into lockdown then you feel like an idiot.

Reply
RichardM
25/5/2017 11:36:09 am

Yeah, I hear you. I think it's something that should be explored in its own genre... Sort of like Splinter Cell, but even more stealth-a-rific? Play as a spy infiltrating facilities populated by enemies who communicate by radio, use surveillance cameras, never forget where you were, think about where you might be going, call in reinforcements, and so on... Sounds fun, in a sadistic sort of way. Sounds hard: hard to play, hard to make.

Reminds me a bit of Subversion by Introversion Software. They stopped making it because the gameplay wasn't fun. Maybe that's the problem?

Reply
Biscuits the character
25/5/2017 11:36:59 am

But! The genre most modern games peddle in is called 'stealth-action', which here means 'sneak around until you are seen, then just attack'.

I take your point with how stupid hiding looks in the moment, but I thought it worked in Horizon specifically because dino vision is based on movement. You could make up anything you want to account for why robots can only see certain things too. This does not make sense, of course, for the game's human characters.

Far more egregious for me is the 'Oh, my workmate is dead on the floor here...I'll walk around in a more suspicious manner for a while (1-2 minutes) before forgetting about it completely.' scenario you outline, especially since we've been able to drag and hide bodies in creative ways since MGS.

But then what would be the answer, everyone in the game world is just hostile forever from the moment a body is discovered? Why ever make them passive then? The difficulty in just making them patrol in a suspicious manner for longer is a) it's an arbitrary change that isn't anymore realistic and b) it makes the game really boring.

The recent Batman games tried something here, whereby you could mess with the sanity of the baddies by picking off their mates around them. It was pretty much just changing their behaviour slightly, but what worked really well was their exasperated cries and their firing blindly into the air as they found another unconscious cohort, cursing the fact they had been assigned to patrol the same place. This also references the 'criminals are scared shitless of Batman' angle the franchise is so keen to promote. Not a gameplay change, but it makes things a lot more believable and involving


Should people hiding in 'plain sight' (foliage etc.) become completely invisible to the player, so we are unsure where our avatar is? Again in Horizon, if you keep luring people to you and killing them, the guards notice a pile of bodies around a bush, and if you are still in that bush, they notice you immediately, which worked for me.

I'm willing to suspend disbelief for this kind of thing the way I am for a blockbuster movie or something. It doesn't stick out for me that guards don't notice me, the same way it doesn't stick out that people keep saying the same phrase again and again in RPGs, or that my character is able to carry around 20 weapons in FPSeses

Reply
Biccers
25/5/2017 11:44:15 am

I'll add that the best stealth game I've played has 0 stealth mechanics: Stalker on hardest difficulty. Enemies can see you from miles away, and will keep up the pursuit until you hide in an old pipe. Superb game there.

And the most game-breaking and plain stupid stealth decision in recent days was having Ellie follow you around in TLOU

Reply
Spiney O'Sullivan
25/5/2017 12:14:10 pm

I agree, stealth needs to be parsed heavily to be fun, rather than a simulation, unless that's what the developer is going for. Real life sneakery has too many variables, so a lot of abstraction is necessary to work as a game. I accept that Altair can hide by standing in the middle of someone else's conversation is a proxy for really getting lost in a crowd, or that guards seem to have serious ADHD ("Daniels? No! Who did this to - oh well, back to walking up and down this hallway next to this open ventilation grate"), because otherwise the game would be way more complex, and every single mission would take hours. It's the same way you have to accept that in every shooter you're the only guy in the world who can regenerate health.

That said, if someone wants to make a really hardcore stealth game they're welcome to. I just personally wouldn't want to play it the same way I have no interest in smashing my head off the wall that is Dark Souls.


Also Batman's predatory stealth was fantastic, especially as you start to feel in control of a room in a way I never did it Hitman. No wonder they knocked it off in Assassin's Creed over the years. It's also he only game where not hiding bodies makes sense, because Batman wants them to know.

Reply
Tricksies
25/5/2017 12:37:21 pm

Oblig. 'Dark Souls is more fun than hard' post. It is crazy to me that more people 'of a certain age' haven't clicked with Dark Souls, it's no more difficult than nearly any game from 30 years ago

Spiney O'Sullivan
25/5/2017 12:48:09 pm

Oh, no disrespect intended to Dark Souls. It seems to be a very good game that people enjoy. But I just don't feel that it's for me.

Biscuits
25/5/2017 03:46:11 pm

Yeah, Batman's stealth sections were great, and you are correct: taking control of a room while the goons got more and more agitated felt amazing

Hamptonoid
25/5/2017 10:15:58 pm

Excellent thread! Aye, freaking out the goons was a lot of fun, that's a great shout. I don't know if this really qualifies for the scope of SBA's gripes, but the oddworld games did a great job of using stealth.

Nice article. But you're wrong about the strawberry ice cream segment!

cinco boy
25/5/2017 11:53:11 am

The latest Hitman did stealth well. I set off an alert because I picked up a body and hid it, but forgot the gun. A guard noticed the assault rifle lying on the ground and began searching for the careless owner.

Hitman also lets you carry on playing after an alarm is triggered (instafail missions can sod off), but it drastically changes the way things play out as there are more guards, on high alert, and previous routes and assassination options are (logically) blocked off.

Reply
CdrJameson
25/5/2017 12:24:24 pm

Possibly odd choice for a stealth game, but I think the original X-Com games (certainly Laser Squad and Rebelstar Tactical Command) did it well. If you stayed out of (clear to read) enemy sight lines they completely ignored you, but when you were spotted several of them would gang up and attack your last known position. I don't think they had any mechanism for shrugging shoulders and giving up.

Reply
Kendall9000
27/5/2017 12:56:37 am

I spent some time playing though Laser Squad on a Speccy emulator recently. It was definitely noticeable (and appreciated) that the computer didn't cheat - as you say, enemies would walk right past you if you didn't cross their line of sight.

It opened up some really cheesy tactics where you could get multiple baddies to converge and bunch up in one location, then take them all out with a single grenade. But then that's 'AI' designed to run on a computer that my out-of-date phone can emulate at unplayable warp speed.

Modern computer controlled components should be a whole lot smarter, especially when playing at higher difficulty levels.

Reply
DEAN
25/5/2017 01:04:59 pm

HATE stealth games. Good read, though!

I hate anything that's too tricky... like David Blane.

Reply
Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
25/5/2017 03:14:00 pm

What the author fails to realize is that sneaking around in reality is very difficult, and games cannot give you the same awareness of the location of your body parts not the same mobility to peek around things. Anyone who's played more 'realistic' first person shooters or indeed the Operation Flashpoint/Arma series will know full well the frustration of thinking you're hidden in some grass or behind a log or something, except your leg (and thus hitbox) is actually sticking out for the world to see and shoot at.

Thus the guards have limited vision and intelligence so as to make sneaking around even possible - give them better vision or thoughts and you'll be moaning that it's too hard and there's 'psychic guards' constantly discovering and killing you.

HOWEVER! This does provide impetus for mentioning one of my all time most hated gaming moments. In the original The Getaway, angry wideboy Mark has to sneak into the evil gangster's warehouse hideout to get information as to the whereabouts of his hateful little twat of a son, who has been kidnapped. Never mind the fact that Mark has already slaughtered half the city, in order to get into the Evil Geezer's Office and read a piece of paper, he absolutely cannot be seen by the patrolling guards or else the mission instantly fails. Once you've gotten to the office and gotten the information, though, you are at liberty to then shoot your way out through the same guards.

I'm sorry, but what? What fucking difference would it have made? I am already a large cockney in an ill-fitting suit who can survive multiple gunshot wounds and take on an entire army, so blimming what if they were to have discovered me sneaking up the stairs? I'd have just shot them in their stupid faces, leaned against the wall to catch my breath for a few moments, and then gone upstairs to rifle through the big bad's desk anyway.

Fucking appalling games, incidentally.

Reply
David W
25/5/2017 06:10:49 pm

Good article, even though you've slightly ruined Deus Ex for me.

Consider the diameter of a typical bathroom extractor vent. Now imagine why video game toilets need human-sized ventilation shafts.

Reply
Jim
25/5/2017 06:40:05 pm

Do you question the combat in these games too though? I haven't actually played zero dawn but the majority of action games have you killing hundreds/thousands of enemies over the course of the game, whilst taking ludicrous amounts of damage! surely this is just as unbelievable as the stealth you are questioning?

As someone mentioned earlier, striving for complete realism in these mechanics is a futile exercise until the way we interact with games is vastly improved.

Reply
Voodoo76
26/5/2017 11:54:22 am

I agree Jim. It doesn't bother me if games aren't realistic, they're video games. I've found so many games boring because they're trying to be realistic, and it makes any shortcomings even more obvious. I'd rather be a plumber bouncing on turtles heads then a generic soldier shooting people in the head.

Reply
Dave
25/5/2017 07:39:15 pm

Frankly, stealth in games bored me to tears.

Maybe it's me just getting old, but the best bit of stealth is on Streets of Rage 2 when you wait for the guy on the park bench to wake up then immediately drop kick him.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This section will not be visible in live published website. Below are your current settings:


    Current Number Of Columns are = 2

    Expand Posts Area =

    Gap/Space Between Posts = 12px

    Blog Post Style = card

    Use of custom card colors instead of default colors = 1

    Blog Post Card Background Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Shadow Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Border Color = current color

    Publish the website and visit your blog page to see the results

    Picture
    Support Me on Ko-fi
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    RSS Feed Widget
    Picture

    Picture
    Tweets by @mrbiffo
    Picture
    Follow us on The Facebook

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014


    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ